काहे को दिया जलाया

This is the third of Hamida Banu's solos in Moorti and the thinnest entry in the film's catalogue: hindigeetmala lists it with fewer listener ratings than any other song from the picture, it did not appear in the 2011 blog series that covered seven of Moorti's numbers, and no commentary on it exists in any source consulted. The credits are firm — Hamida Banu singing, Pandit Indra's words, Bulo C. Rani's music — and the disc survives in collectors' transfers. Beyond that, this entry does not have material for claims, and does not make any.

No raag attribution and no arrangement notes survive for this song. What can be said applies to the album as a whole: Bulo C. Rani's Ranjit scores of 1944-46 keep to harmonium, sarangi and light percussion, favour slow and medium tempos, and leave the voice uncrowded — a house style built around singers rather than orchestras. Hamida Banu, sixteen or seventeen at the time and about two years into film work, sings in the light, unforced upper register that distinguished her from the heavier voices Bulo C. Rani otherwise preferred.

The title is a question — why was the lamp lit — and the diya is one of the load-bearing objects of Hindi song, standing at different times for hope, for a vigil kept for someone expected, and for a life burning itself down. Which of these Pandit Indra intended cannot be established without the full text, which this entry does not reproduce, so the reading is left open. What can be said is that the interrogative opening, kahe ko, belongs to the plain spoken Hindi register the lyricist used for the film's female solos, as against the Persianised Urdu he wrote for its Mukesh ghazals.

Moorti was directed by Chaturbhuj Doshi for Ranjit Movietone, with Motilal and Khursheed leading and a supporting company that included Padma Banerjee, Yashwant Dave, Kamal Zamindar, Kaneez and Tarabai. Hamida Banu sang three of its ten songs without appearing on screen. No print of the film is known to survive and the reference works preserve credits without a plot, so nothing can be said about where this number fell in the story or who performed it on camera.

Its legacy is bare survival, which for a 1945 programme picture is not nothing. Two transfers of the disc are in circulation, one of them Song No. 07 in Mirsa's Vintage Music Collection's 2023 upload of the whole Moorti soundtrack in catalogue order, and the song is recorded in the standard online song indexes with its credits intact. That is the entire documented afterlife, and inventing more of one would be worse than leaving it here.